Saving St. Germ (8 page)

I started to apologize again, but he touched my hand to stop me. “Forget it,” he said. “Let’s just leave it alone for a minute.”

I sat there thinking about him and how, right from the beginning, I’d found myself infatuated with him. He’d come stealing into my heavily guarded thoughts; walking home from the lab one cool night, my mind immersed in contemplation of immunodetection of tyrosine phosphorylation on protein 70K, I rounded a corner and there he was. I’d seen him before at seminars or occasionally in a bar
—
we knew each other just a little.

He was playing basketball on a playground with some other guys. Under the arc lights, he leaped and turned, sweating, a baseball cap bill-back on his head. There was the staccato thump of the ball against asphalt, panting, cursing, the small brutal sound of rubber soles braking, squealing over cement. The whole thing looked choreographed: each player jumping, guarding, hollering, bobbing, flapping arms as if he could fly. Someone rising straight up in the middle like a jackrabbit, lobbing the ball toward the hoop. I stood watching for a while. He pleased me, Jesse
—
watching him move, his dark-stained T-shirt pleased me, the sweaty rag hanging out of his back pocket pleased me, and his hair falling down over one eye. The sudden smile he threw over one shoulder, the rocketing ball beneath his hand as he pounded around the court. And I thought, What is this? Pleasure? Actual pleasure? I put my hand out, dazed, in back of me, like someone feeling for a familiar weapon, trying to locate the irony so readily, comically implicit in the situation, but somehow I couldn’t put my hand on it. Desire: I admit that I was humbled by its power over me. When was the last time I’d leaned against a chain-link fence for so long that the diamond pattern stayed pressed hard into my cheek, when was the last time my heart pounded hard and a gold stream of warmth poured down the back of my neck like honey?

“I’m pretty sure I’ve been living inside my brain too long,” was the first thing I said to him as he came around the fence after the game, panting and grinning.

So what had happened? What would the book of gene folklore tell us about our separate chemistries, why they’d reacted simultaneously? What genes had predestined us to feel delight in each other’s presence, to lean into each other with lust and curiosity, to feel affectionate, languorous, vertiginous with desire? All that rush and tremor, I thought, for what? Good-bye in a Thai restaurant.

There was a pause. I sighed.

“Tell me what you’re thinking about, Esme.”

“DNA.”

“What
else
?”

“Death.”

“You know, Ez, after dinner with you I kinda look forward to autopsy lab.”

“Don’t be mad at me, Jesse,” I said through my teeth, which had suddenly begun chattering. “I’m doing my best. It’s not Q and it’s not hypochondria and it’s not you and me. It’s like a horror movie about chemical degeneration. I look at people and I watch them fall apart, fast forward. I think I can see what they’ll die of.”

I put my head down. I really wasn’t feeling very well. What I’d said was true but there was more. I was having nightmares, not just about everyone’s DNA, a
dead
inert molecule, after all
—
so dead that you could thaw out a mastodon and still read its genetic info like a report card, but about all of us, all the sad people like me who never had the language, the words to ease fate. And I
had
come to believe that some of Nature’s mistakes, the slipups, were fate. But that made my destiny and my inability to describe it all the more ghastly. I couldn’t even be
funny
about it. Man, I was really going crazy, I thought. I had to get out of Cambridge.

“C’mon,” he said, “look at me, tell the Nobel Committee, what do you see?”

“Well, Jesus, I’m not going to tell you what I think you’re going to die of, Jesse.”

“No. Just tell me, what do you see?”

“A guy.” I smiled. “A nice guy I’ll never see again.”

“And what do you think I’ll die of, a broken heart?”

I looked up and laughed. “
No
. No, of course not.”

“Well, maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.”

I sat back in my chair and stared at him. “You won’t.”

“You
know what I like about medicine? What every decent doc likes. Being right there in the swamp: the emergency room, triage. No, really, don’t laugh, I do. I’m in the ball game. You people, you blender jockeys, sit around splicing and snipping and staining slides, looking at squiggles in microscopes and deducing profundities. Looking for St. Germ. Saving St. Germ. Some tiny little organism, some protein sequence that’s going to change the quality of human life, but only intellectually, only as a model for
thought.
”

“Only as a model for understanding.”

“Understanding
it,
not
people
.”

“Jesse? I’m sorry, really. I’ve got to go home and
pack
.”

He nodded at me, then signaled the waitress, who tiptoed over to whisper that there was absolutely no MSG in our food tonight. We thanked her. After she’d collected some plates and disappeared, Jesse covered my hand with his.

“I want to thank God for what little chemistry there is left that you don’t know about.”

“In that case, thank you, God, for Jesse,” I said, and raised my glass with my other hand. But even as I looked at him, then shyly away, certain we’d sleep together one last time before I got into my car the next morning and drove west
—
I felt the sense of stasis, the torpor certain expectations of intimacy evoke. His hand on mine implied that there had been something more than heat between us. I wanted to believe it had just been heat. I had to. However, I’d have to collaborate, at least for tonight, in this revised version of our history. I winked and put the hibiscus back in my hair. I smiled. I drank my drink.

Then the bill came and I watched him pay, thinking about nothing at all except starting my car, turning the corner for the last time, thinking about what the light would look like in the early morning. In my mind, I saw the shadows part; then I drove into them. They stretched, then covered my car like black, moving water.

M
Y AFTERNOON LAB
students were at work on the Grignard Effect (named for the illustrious chemist Victor Grignard)—trying to make it happen in the lab. It was a synthetic reaction requiring some sophistication of technique; the task was to make a large molecule out of two smaller ones. The difficulty was always the same: getting the thing started. The reaction is very sensitive to moisture; traces of water in the flask or solvent will stop it cold. I looked around the lab; light filtered in from above and there was this insistent green
ringing
sound: fifty glass rods beating inside fifty glass tubes, mixing up the reagents.

I love Organic lab, I love coming down the hall, past the ice makers, the balance room with its computerized scales, the heavy solid melting-point apparatus—and waltzing into the lab, wearing the clear goggles everyone wears to protect the eyes from corrosive vapors, chemical splashes. The air stinks gently of sulfur and acetone and a hundred other chemicals, a sweet rotten smell circulating around and through the ducts, up to the roof and out. Even the make-up air system, pumped through the air-conditioning and heating ducts, can’t get rid of that musty odor. Each work space under its fume hood looks like some kind of kitchen altar, with its bright silver fittings for steam and cold water, each with a vacuum line, thermal well, heating mantle, Claisen reactor, rack of tubes, microscope. I love enumerating the lab’s infinitely patient, self-contained components: the centrifuge, the big cupboards filled with large brown bottles of butanol, chloroform, chlorobenzene, nitrophenol, the sink with its gallon jugs of acetone for cleaning hands and glass fittings, the flameproof vacuum-storage cabinet, the safety shower. I would never compare entering the lab to entering a church, yet the lab glows with an unmistakable aura of prefigurement and awe—the ducts and tall flasks stand like holy effigies, the distillation apparatus and rubber tubing swing from hooks like ornate censers; it is a sealed-off world touched by grace. A place of reverse miracles—miracles happening in a controlled state.

I paused under the fume hood of Albert Chang, one of my best students. He had completed the experiment and documented the reaction with remarkable speed. There before our goggled eyes was a round-bottomed flask in which ether boiled below the core temperature of the human body at ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. We stood staring at the murky low-level bubbling and I patted Albert on the shoulder. He smiled at me shyly, one side of his mouth turned up.

“Nice work, Albert.”

I looked at his carefully handwritten notes next to the flask. Under the headings
PURPOSE, REACTION, APPARATUS, PROCEDURE, OBSERVATION,
and
DATA,
he’d written exactly what he’d caused to happen. And how. I pulled off my goggles and read the notations with interest: not a wasted word.

There was a loud glassy crash across the lab. I put down Albert’s lab book and hurried toward the noise. Here was another one of my students, Donald Brandeman, who’d come up to me after class recently and told me that I was “wasting precious time” by airing my political views in class. Donald was a tall, handsome, blank-faced boy with sculpted, metallic hair and an irritatingly expansive manner. When I tried to talk to him privately, he always insisted on drawing others, his pals, into the conversation. He was a frat boy, a competitive swimmer; he wanted to be a successful scientist employed by a large corporation with government contracts and he wanted an end to my “unnecessary digressions,” as he put it. I found clichéd behavior amusing, because I always
assume
the presence of irony, but after a while, it occurred to me that Donald Brandeman was very earnest.

I was used to getting along with my students. It surprised me that he disliked me so intensely and, though I’d never have admitted it, it hurt my feelings. I had overheard him telling his friends in the hallway just outside my office that UGC was sorry they’d hired me, but they “had to have a woman” for Affirmative Action reasons and now they were stuck with me. “She doesn’t
produce
,” I heard him say, “not like the male professors.”

I was sensitive on the subject of my career at UGC. I was a hotshot from the East when they hired me, a demon gene-splicer, on the synthetic-protein trail; since I’d married Jay and given birth to Ollie, my research had moved to the back burner, my reading and lab time dwindled. I’d sat in my office for a long time after taking in the boy’s comments, which I knew had been destined for my ears. I sat there until it got dark.

As I approached him, Donald Brandeman looked coy. There was shattered glass at his feet, but he made no move to pick up. Three of his ever-present companions, coughing into their hands and shrugging, backed away as I came up. One of them snapped the straps of his goggles like a rubber band.

“What happened here, Donald?”

“Aaaah, Prof Charbonneau, I don’t know.” He hung his head and glanced sideways at his pals. “I broke a standard taper joint, I guess. It leaped right out of my hand.”

“How?”

“How? Umm, well ... hmmm, good question.” There were muffled snorts of laughter behind him. “Yeah, good question. Well, I was having some trouble getting the ... male and female fittings together, you know.” The laughter grew. “And I was trying to stick the male into the ... female and it wasn’t, you know, sliding right in ... so I got some, whaddayacallit, stopcock joint grease here and it just got me so slippery, Prof, you know, the stopcock grease lubricant and the glass fitting shot right out of my hand like a ...well, um, I don’t know what ...” The pals were rocking with laughter now.

“Shut up,” I said calmly. “Not one of you goons is going to pass this semester, so how ’bout hauling ass back to your hoods and boiling some water. Maybe you’ll be able to keep house when you flunk out of college. I’m talking to
Brandeman
here, not you guys.”

The pals shuffled apart; there was a mumble or two, then quiet as they returned to their places.

“What you were doing here,” I said, “had nothing to do with Grignard, did it?”

“Well, Prof ...”

“You guys were just having a little fun, right?”

Donald Brandeman looked back at me with an absolutely contemptuous face. His skin had a filmy sheen to it, I noticed, wondering if his rigorous daily immersion in chlorine had given him a permanent subcutaneous gloss. His hair gleamed mutedly, slick and swirled as batter.

“Prof, I have to ask you something. Do you think you swear a lot—I mean, for a woman?”

“I
do,
Donald. I do swear a lot, it’s true. So often I forget I’m around sensitive ears like yours.”

I smiled at him; the look of hatred on his face was riveting.

“Wait a minute, Donald—now don’t be coy! Have you actually
found me out
? I mean, my thing for
testosterone.
So I take a little in a vein every now and again, so
what,
huh?”

His eyes narrowed. “Is this supposed to be one of your famous jokes?”

“Donald, Donald, Donald. You really need to develop a sense of humor. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly why I added the synthetic estrogens to the stopcock joint grease you ended up smearing all over the taper joint! I just had a feeling you’d end up ... coating yourself. You don’t have to worry, Donald. The changes you’ll notice at first will be
small
—subtle tapering, developing curves, trill in the voice, that sort of ...”

He cursed under his breath.

“
What,
Donald? Now don’t get
upset,
sweetie. If you need help from one of the
guys
cleaning this up, let me know!”

I smiled and turned away. There was a great deal of banging and crashing as he swept up the glass. When he’d finished, he tore his goggles off and hurled himself through the lab’s double doors and out into the hall.